you capture - flowers

There was so much to figure out. Big, life-altering decisions had to be made, and they had to be made Right Now. And we were hungry, Hubby and I, so we went to our favorite little cafe for some soup and a sandwich, and we figured we could figure it out there. Maybe.





They were out of potato leek soup by the time we got there. But they let me finagle a vegetarian panini, even though there isn't one on the menu, because I so wanted something warm and comforting and slightly gooey. And we sat by the window to wait for our food.

There was so much to talk about, but we just sat there, silent, staring at the flowers in the window, hoping they would give us the answers. Maybe they did because, somehow, during a meal in which very few words were spoken, we figured out what to do.

We were going to try to sell our house and buy another. Sell the house we live in, that previously belonged to my great-aunt, that we worked so hard to make our own and is just a bit (or maybe a lot) small, to try and buy the fully beautifully renovated and spacious house that was originally built by my great-grandfather. We agreed that whatever happened was meant to happen. We'd move. Or we wouldn't. And either way, we would accept that. At least, in theory. But we wanted that house. Everything about it was so perfect, on so many levels. It just seemed like fate, like we had been led to this point, this place, this house. I had already started thinking of it as "our house."

And then we sat down to talk to the realtor. And the more he said, the further back we stepped. And at the end of the night, I was in tears. Not because we couldn't get the house. I was in tears because I knew that, technically, we could get the house. And I knew, with everything in me, that we shouldn't. And I knew that Hubby knew it, too. We both knew that the wise thing to do was to stay in our small house that we worked so hard to make our own. Even though we wanted that other house, even though we technically could do it. So we made a great big grown-up decision - it is better to stay where you are than it is to spend too much money to be someplace newer and bigger just because you can. And we thanked the realtor for his time. And we closed the door and took a good, long look at our house.

Then we went back to the little cafe, and sat by the window again, and drank tea (me) and coffee (him). We talked about how much we'd learned in the whole process, how it seemed like such a long time when it was only four days, how nice that house would have been. And we talked about how nice our house is, how it is just exactly how we chose it to be, how much we've done to improve it, how much I adore my tiny kitchen, how the fact that his office is our bedroom has never really been a problem for us, how the tree we planted in the yard for our first anniversary is doing so well, how I finally figured out the right flowers to plant, how I know just where to step so the floor doesn't creak as I'm walking around in the pre-dawn morning, how many memories we have there already, how many more are to come. How, actually, it's home.

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See more at Beth's.